GoKawiilFollowing the oxc team’s release of official support for the Rust React Compiler on August 4, 2026, we switched our 1,036-file React Router codebase (Outlyne, a website builder) over to it and saw a ~17.6× speedup on the compiler portion of our build.
The v6.1.0 release of @vitejs/plugin-react brought “experimental native React Compiler support”, which you can opt in to by passing { compiler: true } to the plugin in your Vite config. And for those unable to use the Vite React plugin (e.g. if, like us, you’re using React Router in framework mode), @acusti/vite-plugin-react-compiler is a minimal Vite plugin to React-compile your codebase regardless of the rest of your build pipeline.
Faster Builds = Happier Devs + Cheaper CI
The headline feature of this change is the speedup. Per Boshen, the oxc project lead:
It is more than 10 times faster than Babel in our preliminary benchmark.
We saw more than a 17× speedup, with 1,036 files going from 14.3s when built with Babel to 0.81s natively (single-threaded). This is huge for us because, with the speed of change brought about by agent-assisted software development, CI usage and GitHub Actions minutes have become a real cost center, and waiting on CI is a bummer and puts further pressure on our already overly fragmented task-management brains.
Note that those speedups apply only to the compiler part of the build process. You likely have a lot of other stuff going on during the build, so the overall build time improvement won’t be nearly as dramatic. In our case, the build got around 2.4× faster (22.1s → 9.3s).
What about React Compiler’s limitations?
Despite speed being the headliner, I’m more excited about the benefits of being on the latest and greatest version of the React Compiler, which has already fixed some substantial limitations in JavaScript support that were still present in v1.0 of the Babel-based React Compiler. That includes support for any kind of conditional logic in try/catch blocks, which was a blocker for many with the initial stable 1.0 release of the compiler. Another nice fix that landed just last week at the time of writing is support for reassigning a destructured component prop that then gets used in a nested closure, e.g.:
export default function Foo ( { value }: { value: null | string } ) { value = value ?? "this is a fallback" ; return < button onClick = {() => console.log(value)}>{value} </ button > ; } Code language: JavaScript ( javascript )
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